


no one's to blame

by krinka



Series: no one's to blame - or the Dororo (2019) Reincarnation AU nobody asked for [1]
Category: Dororo (Anime 2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Angst with a Happy Ending, Author Is Sleep Deprived, Crack, Crack Treated Seriously, Crack Treated Way Too Seriously, Crack and Angst, Everyone Is Alive, Gen, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Past Character Death, Reincarnation, Temporary Character Death, The Author Regrets Everything
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-07
Updated: 2019-04-07
Packaged: 2020-01-06 10:46:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18386873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/krinka/pseuds/krinka
Summary: The thing is, Mio feels old. She wasn’t old when she died, and she isn’t old now that she’s seventeen either – but, the thing is: Mio’s has only a few friends her own age (she spends most of her time volunteering at the homeless center, at the halfway home, at the orphanage – all her friends are either twice older or twice younger than her) and the ones she does are kind but ditzy girls with good hearts and good families. The kind that like to watch chick flicks on Saturdays and get together to gossip and to look up their past lives with tarot cards and smartphone apps.The thing is, oh – everyone’s a princess or a pharaoh or some great lady or another. Mio wonders where all the poor people, the starved people and the barely-there people (the cripples and prostitutes and orphans and peasants) went.





	no one's to blame

**Author's Note:**

> This is one of the weirder things I've written in my life. I blame it on the fact that I liked the minor characters from episode 7 a bit too much for my own good.

Even months later, Mio isn’t quite sure how her friends roped her into a _singing in a musical_. Yes, she has a decent voice. Yes, she is minoring in music studies. Yes, she can put it in her portfolio. And this would all be well and good, if she was actually interested in pursuing a career in music, which she is not.

No, Mio already has a dream, and it is called becoming a social worker. Her adoptive parents are divided on the issue – Yajiro being ever-supportive, while Ohagi suggested doing something just a bit more exceptional, like becoming a social justice warrior or something. Her adoptive mother has never been one with words. She’s a physical therapist, a doctor – good with her hands and her remedies and her pet spiders, but lacking in any sort of coherent human contact. Mio doesn’t mind ( _it reminded her of the few good things she had to remember, from a life she lived once upon a long time ago_ ).

She is lucky, this time around, to have a family who supports her ( _sometimes she is afraid of what they will think of her, if they ever find out what she was long, long ago – but then Yajiro will tell her an old tale from the time of prosper in the lands of Daigo, of Sakai, of Asakura. She knows, somehow, that the stories could have come neither from history nor imagination, and is comforted)._

 _(Once, he tells her of a young, rebellious man who fell head over heels with an immortal Jorogumo spider-lady, of a blind swordsman with blades for arms who aided their escape from a village which wanted them dead – and then he stops, because there are big, fat tears rolling down Mio’s cheeks and she may only be nine, but suddenly she is all too aware what it is to yearn for someone so bad it_ hurts _.)_

_(She guesses who the young, rebellious man and his dear Jorogumo are, but it doesn’t matter by that point. Hyakkimaru had approved of her adoptive parents, once upon a long time ago. She wonders what he would think of them – of her – if he could see them now. She hopes he can every night she goes to bed and recounts all the good things she’d accomplished that day.)_

_._

The thing is, Mio feels old. She wasn’t old when she died, and she isn’t old now that she’s seventeen either – but, the thing is: Mio’s has only a few friends her own age ( _she spends most of her time volunteering at the homeless center, at the halfway home, at the orphanage – all her friends are either twice older or twice younger than her)_ and the ones she does are kind but ditzy girls with good hearts and good families. The kind that like to watch chick flicks on Saturdays and get together to gossip and to look up their past lives with tarot cards and smartphone apps.

The thing is, oh – everyone’s a princess or a pharaoh or some great lady or another. Mio wonders where all the poor people, the starved people and the barely-there people ( _the cripples and prostitutes and orphans and peasants_ ) went.

 _(She knows, she knows, because they’re still here. Everywhere. All around people who pretend not to see them_ ).

.

She wonders where Hyakkimaru went, after everything.

She wonders if she will ever see him again.

.

Stupidly, she wonders if Hyakkimaru will see her perform in this damn musical she’s been roped into – which is alright, since it’s a fundraiser, so it’s bearable despite her stage fright. Getting to spot Hyakkimaru somewhere in the crowd would make all the over-the-top, cheery numbers more than worth it. Except it would also make them meaningless, because she’d jump right off the stage if Hyakkimaru was in the audience.

.

She spends most of her time at the orphanage she was adopted from, hanging out with Take and the other orphans – some old, some new – and helping Doctor Jukai, without whom this place wouldn’t be half as functioning or as warm as it is. Ohagi helps out too, whenever she has free time and isn’t worrying about running her own clinic. Dr. Jukai and Ohagi – who Mio has never really gotten into the habit of calling mom, though she tries _(Ohagi doesn’t seem to mind, though sometimes, when she’s feeling explicably fond or proud in that exasperated, oh-you-silly-humans way, she’ll call Mio her spiderling)_ – get along like a house on fire. Well, a house that caught fire in a thunderstorm and was a little side-tracked by the rain, but once they had a big confrontation about her adoptive mother being a demon spider and Dr. Jukai apparently being Hyakkimaru’s adoptive father in his last life ( _somehow everything keeps coming back to Hyakkimaru, doesn’t it?_ ) and got everything smoothed out, it turned out they had a lot in common – such as a hobby in carpentry, a love of shitty rom-cons and an even more avid love of shoji.

But the thing is: Mio is good at keeping secrets – too good, actually. Some things don’t change, no matter what era you’re reborn into ( _some do, some_ have _to, surely_ ). This is why it takes her three months to actually confront Dr. Jukai about her eavesdropping, and the fact that she actually knew his son in her past life.

There’s a lump in her throat, and it’s been there ever since they finished helping Take with his new prosthetic, and were left alone in Dr. Jukai’s office in the orphanage. Finally, she plucks up the courage to ask hum “Dr. Jukai, do you… have children?”

He startles, frozen stiff for a few seconds. Then his expression mellows into a quiet, mute sadness. He shakes his head, saying “I did, a long, long time ago.”

Mio swallows thickly, but presses on. “Tell me about him.” she says, not unkindly “Tell me about Hyakkimaru.” And only after she’d implored him so does she realize she’d called his son, who she was not supposed to know, by name.

Dr. Jukai’s eyes widen, fill with tears. He opens his mouth to ask a question that never forms. Mio gives him a watery smile, and confesses to what he’d already realized.

She tells him a lot – everything she knew about Hyakkimaru, she tells him, though she tells him little of her past self. He doesn’t ask. Instead he tells her of a small babe he’d found adrift in a boat by the riverside, about a boy he’d raised for fifteen years before it became apparent that there were things out in the world that would harm him if he did not take the fight to them first. He tells her of the day they parted, and how he never saw Hyakkimaru again after that.

And then he thanks her. He thanks her a thousand times, for being there for his Hyakkimaru, for taking care of him, for giving him a roof to sleep under, for being there for him when Jukai himself couldn’t, for showing him what it meant to have a proper family–

“If I find him,” Mio says to him, clasping her hands over his gnarled, tear-stained ones “If I find him, I swear I’ll bring him to you.”

.

In the end, it turns out like this: she’s in the chorus, he’s in the orchestra. They go to the same university. She’s majoring in social work with a minor in music studies. He’s majoring in music studies, and can play six different instruments and knows about a hundred something songs from memory. It’s their first joint practice for the fundraiser musical they were supposed to perform.

It takes her a moment to recognize him, at first – not because he’s changed, he still has the same hair-style and the same, dead-eyed stare. No, it takes her a moment to realize it’s him, _actually_ _him_ , because she’s imagined this before, fooled herself before and ran unabashedly to a stranger.

It happens right in the middle of a song too. Her eyes, which are roaming distractedly, settle onto his disheveled, beautiful head. He stops playing when he hears her sing. The conductor, a strict but frail looking man, throws his hands up in frustration and calls for a short break.

She’s not sure who made a beeline for who first, but when they’re in front of each other Hyakkimaru says “Mio,” and suddenly they’re hugging each other for dear life.

( _Later, she will feel ashamed. Happy, but ashamed. Later, she will think, over and over again: my soul is cleaner now. It is.)_

**Author's Note:**

> Also, the second work in this crazy series is already up.


End file.
